Abstract
One of the most graceful phenomena widely observed in nature is self-assembly; living systems spontaneously assemble their body structure through the developmental process. While this remarkable phenomenon still remains much to be understood in biology, the concept of self-assembly becomes undeniably indispensable also in artificial systems as they increase in size and complexity. Based on this consideration, this paper discusses the realization of self-assembly with the use of a multi-robot system. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: the first concerns the exploitation of emergent phenomena stemming from the interplay between the control and mechanical systems: the second is the hardware design of a multi-robotic system that can realize the self-assembly proposed.
